well turns out my xine trouble was from not setting the region code on the dvd player.

i had installed ogle to see if it would work and it was giving me the same error about the title key failing...amoungst the listed reason it gave that this would happen was the region key not matching thte dvd or never having been set.

this gave me the idea to try another dvd-rom drive and sure enough its working.

it mentioned two programs from sourceforge or freshmeat for setting this code on the dvd player....has anyone had to do this?